A cellular communications provider may have thousands of geographically distributed cell sites and corresponding base stations. Maintenance of the base stations can be expensive, and the costs of sending maintenance crews to malfunctioning base stations can be a significant component of overall maintenance costs. However, it can at times be difficult for a provider to accurately assess the status of a base station. In addition, it may be difficult to determine the nature or cause of a malfunction.
In some situations, it may be possible to query the base station itself to obtain performance parameters, and to analyze the performance parameters to detect performance degradation. However, performance indicators received from the base station may not be accurate or reliable in that they are generated by the base station, which itself might be malfunctioning.
The difficulty in remotely assessing base station status may result in undetected outages, which may negatively affect user experiences. In addition, difficulty in determining base station status may result in needlessly dispatching a service crew to a site or in sending the wrong type of service crew.